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In Chinese history, food is always tied with aristocracy. In the Shang Dynasty, King Zhou of Shang, one of the most extravagant emperors, is famous for filling the pool with wine and hanging the meat in the forest so that he would enjoy wine and meat anytime and anywhere. There is no doubt food comes first for Chinese food. Mass population depend on food to survive, while the gentry distinct themselves through setting a high standard of cuisine.

A Dream of Red Mansions, regarded as the dictionary of aristocratic life, not only depicts daily diets and party cuisine, but also documents indigents and recipes of those cuisine. Cao Xueqing the author was raised up in a Jiangnan’s family. His family was in charge of silk tribute to the emperor. A Dream of Red Mansions is, in fact, based on Cao’s experience as a noble person when he was young. However, those descriptions of such high standard of cuisine point out hierarchy and political power exerted through rare ingredients and sophisticated recipes.

The most known plot, “Grandma Liu visits the Red Mansions”, demonstrates how hierarchy is established and reinforced by food. Grandma Liu is a rural woman, who is a distant relative of the royal family, and is invited to visit them at the Red Mansions. The royal family treats her with a dish called Dried Eggplant (Qiexiang, “茄鲞”). The royal family sees this dish as a home-made food not even a sophisticated one, commented, “It is not complicated to prepare. It only needs fresh eggplant to be peeled, chopped, and fried with chicken oil. Then stew in the chicken broth the fried eggplant with chicken, fungus, mushroom, bamboo shoots and nut, all chopped, until the broth is dried. Put the dried stew in a sealed porcelain jar with sesame oil. When you need to enjoy it, mix it with fried chicken claws.” Grand Liu is amazed by Dried Eggplant, and saying it tastes nothing like eggplant. Through Grandma Liu’s reactions, which teases those aristocrats, the segregation is obvious between ordinary people and aristocrats. The most important part in the plot is that those aristocrats enjoy it when someone from the lower class shows his/her astonishment. Moreover, there is power dynamic in the plot. Red Mansions require supports from a huge number of servants. Those servants who are close to family members, such as first footmen and Lady’s maids, contempt Grandma Liu, because they have enjoyed what the family enjoys while Grandma Liu haven’t. Those servants are the agency for aristocracy to exert power upon mass population. Red Mansions seem to be regarded as a world of aristocracy’s own. In fact, aristocracy is not a castle in the air. The foundation is the mass population, – who work as servants, provide indigents, and so on.

Find out here: Recreate Dried Eggplant (Qiexiang, “茄鲞”).

Food system is the most invisible system in urban areas. We consume food every day, but we don’t really understand how food grows and gets to our cities. As is mentioned in Food, by Fabio Parasecoli, food doesn’t come to our table as what originally is, but as prepared, cooked, packaged. It is neither understandable nor worthy of concern for most people in urban areas due to the complexities of production and distribution in food system.

The development of technologies contributes to such invisibility in China. With the prevail establishment of delivery service, consumers no longer need to physically purchase food. We click, order, and receive. Along the process, we wouldn’t actually see the food we order in reality but a mock-up of it. This feeling is intensified in Taobao and JD.com. When I purchase food via Tmall Supermarket, directly run by Alibaba, I would expect high quality and clean and neat appearance. In fact, online shops only sell fresh agriculture products that have been selected first. Such selection process has made the whole food system even more invisible. Not every apple looks like the Apple’s icon. Apples have their own shapes and colors. But the standard of selection is about how to select apples that have the same or at least similar shapes. The uniformity takes away our sensitivity to learn about the food reality: for one, food, especially fresh agriculture products, ought to be different from one another; for another, we don’t really connect one type of food with an actual location. Our parents, the booming generation after World War II, still go to fruit shops and ask vendors where those fruits come from. Because they know, for example, what city or town produces the most wonderful grapefruits. But if asking Generation Z including me, they just don’t know. We are so accustomed to purchasing food non-interactively. We don’t communicate with those who are in the food system or understand the history of what they sell.

I, however, have noticed a new trend on purchasing food recently. Unlike online supermarkets run by big corporations, Pinduoduo is a platform where a lot of local vendors or peasants could access customers in cities. Pinduoduo is also well-known for affordable and low-price products. Customers could gain a sense on where fresh agriculture products originate by knowing where those ship. By contrast, customers receive products from the warehouse in the city they live in or nearby cites, if purchasing via Tmall Supermarket. Additionally, the products they receive often maintain the original appearance, different from one another and sometimes dusty.

Moreover, the diversity in vendors contributes to a new form of communication on food system. Customers would communicate through social media. They not only recommend food products and vendors but also talk about how the products get delivered and where to get the best quality. Surprisingly, they are young learners and observers in food system and motivate themselves to learn more about this invisible system in our daily life.

Mapping is a measure for communication between people, places or times. As is mentioned in Introduction: Mapping Meaning by Denis Cosgrove, maps collect knowledge and construct a structure to spread it, along with which historical, cultural contexts and power structure play an important role. Mapping often consists of four phrases: scale, framing, selections and coding. The map-making process introduced by Denis Cosgrove is determined by authors. By no means would the users nor mass population participate in the map-making process. Once a map is published, the process ends until another version of the map is released.

Internet, however, grand the opportunity for mapping to be more dynamic. As is mentioned in Introduction: Mapping Meaning, the tradition of mapping shows a significant feature as Eurocentric, where cartography could be traced back to “pre-Socratic Greek astronomy and Alexandrian and Roman imperial administration” (8). It shows a pursuit of logos and metaphysics, that the world has an essential question to be answered, which, I believe, laid the foundation of topology and cultural hegemony in mapping. Nevertheless, Internet topples such logocentrism by blurring the boundary of ownership. Before Internet, the authors of maps could make their sole discretion by selecting elements presented and other phenomena omitted. With Internet, everyone could alter maps as long as they are granted access. online maps could update as much as possible, as fast as possible, and put into use as soon as possible, when physical maps must be printed before using and circling. Time sequence in mapping has been deemphasized. Therefore, users, when granted access, could share the ownership with those who claim to be authors. Almost everyone could have right to report an error if the online maps mistake a place or a road. What is more, for family-run business, online maps give them access to either tag or claim a place, usually the site for their business. This has caught my attention. Maps sometimes construct a new reality different from what is surrounding us. In the surrounding reality, those family-run business owners have absolute ownership in their business sites. And such ownership has been expanding into mapping reality.

Admitted, Internet could alter the dynamic in the mapping’s ownership. However, topology still exert in the online maps. As is mentioned above, the perquisite in sharing the ownership has a technological barrier. Only those who are granted access or have the capability in computer coding could participate in the map-making process. Tagging or claiming a certain place now only open to business owners, which means who would like to claim needs to show a certification that they actually own the sites. Additionally, any changes involving users need to be reviewed by the service providers. It strengthens the power of the tech company. A new way for those service providers to make money is to charge business owners to pay for their sites’ exposure in the online maps.

Click here if you want to know more about how claim a place in online maps, taking Baidu Map as an example. 

How do you imagine a residential building?

Recently, a new idea on a residential building has not only been brought out but put into practice. This idea concludes:

The first generation of housing, built with thatched roofs, originated 10,000 years ago.

The second generation of housing, built with bricks, originated 3,000 years ago.

The third generation of housing, residentials with elevators, originated more than 100 years ago.

The fourth generation of housing, apartments with courtyards, innovation up to date. Such residential building has gardens on every floor, and every apartment has a courtyard. It is better than villas, more suitable for human living. But most people can afford and live in.

In Southwestern China, Chengdu already delivered a project of the fourth generation of housing, eight residential buildings with trees on each floor.

Glazer has pointed out, the Garden City was “conceived as an alternative to the city, and as a solution to city problems; this was, and is still. the foundation of its immense power as a planning idea.” And the idea of “the fourth generation of housing” is still built on how to solve city problems, merge gardens with cities.

As indicated in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jabcobs, the problem of great cities has been pictured as a city cannot resemble the English country town or the neighborhood of Walden. A poem, by the best-known idyllist in the history of Chinese poetry, who failed and backed from his career as a politician, becomes the most beautiful description of the ideal lifestyle for Chinese, “While picking asters neath the Eastern fence, my gaze upon the Southern mountain rests.” The imagination towards nature and our ancestors, cavemen, has been a core topic on how to develop a city suitable for living. It seems our living issues cannot be solved unless we go back to ancient times, where our ancestors lived for millions of years. However, cities are not only where we rest or sleep. Cities often deliver certain functions. Urban residents stand in the heart of cities, as we work and interact with other human beings to build and safeguard cities. This is the part I echo most in Introduction and Chapter One in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Cities are an ecosystem alongside economic, political, and cultural exchanges. We cannot discuss one function without referring to others, or simply put each for one area. They work together in the city ecosystem. Under the current context of city planning, buildings, the most visible part, are regarded as administrative achievements. The function to show off what a city could achieve outweighs how a resident could live happily.

Residents are always the most powerful as well as the most helpless in the cities. The residential building with trees on each floor arouses dislikes. Some exposed this building requests its residents never to seal their balconies out of the concern that sealing would damage the whole look of the building, while top floors suffer from windy days. Residents might not control where the city planning from top to bottom. They do have the choice not to buy such apartments.